blackout
Violet.
Excellent.
Removing the obsticles IS KEY.
Since this is your thread Phil...
I ask, what do you consider those obsticles might be?
(sorry if it's already been asked)
Your whole post was right on and well expressed (imho).
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Ask Sunstone Anything About His Views On Mysticism
- Thread starter Sunstone
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Excellent.
Removing the obsticles IS KEY.
Since this is your thread Phil...
I ask, what do you consider those obsticles might be?
(sorry if it's already been asked)
Your whole post was right on and well expressed (imho).
In the view of some mystics, the main obstacles to a mystical experience are emotional or psychological attachments of one sort or another.
It is possible to become attached to nearly anything. For instance, one might become attached to a job, to a possession like a car or ring, to ones spouse or children, to ones friends, to money, to one's home, or to any other material thing. But one also might become attached to non-material things, such as a political issue, an ideology, a set of religious beliefs, a feeling, a notion of the kind of person one is or wants to be, and so on. Any attachment, whether material or immaterial, is an obstacle to mystical experiences.
Greetings Sunstone. Are you enthusiastic about continuing this thread after having had a short break? Such thoughtful answers as you have been providing are time consuming I am sure, and one can understand if time must be provided to other things.
Continuing would allow us to get back at you for all those wonderful threads you have initiated with a question that we have had to struggle with. :angel2:
a..1
Continuing would allow us to get back at you for all those wonderful threads you have initiated with a question that we have had to struggle with. :angel2:
a..1
Don Penguinoini
Modi.
What is your view on Mysticism?
Sunstone, how do you explain mystically the phenomenon of incorruptibility? That is, when the bodies of certain mystics, ascetics and "holy" men/women do not decay or decompose after death?
As a recent example, I believe they have dug up Padre Pio (he of the Stigmata) recently to have him canonised in the RCC, and found his body perfectly preserved.
Is this mystic in your view, or a scientifically explicable phenomenon, or both?
As a recent example, I believe they have dug up Padre Pio (he of the Stigmata) recently to have him canonised in the RCC, and found his body perfectly preserved.
Is this mystic in your view, or a scientifically explicable phenomenon, or both?
Don Penguinoini
Modi.
That was funny, right?
Oooops! I entirely forgot about this thread! Very sorry.
Let's suppose that such things happen. We would need to ask in what way, if any, they are relevant to us? They certainly are of little or no relevance to the sort of mystical experience I have been discussing in this thread.
My apologies. I totally forgot about this thread.
I haven't looked into the issue, Mike. I would be uncomfortable giving an opinion about something I have so little information about.
*Shameless Bump*
I'm in a mood for fun today and, after years of experience, the local sheep are way too nervous of me nowadays for me to have any real fun -- so I'm bumping this thread. Please humor me by asking a more or less serious question about my views of mysticism. I promise that watching your amazingly futile struggle to come up with questions that even I can answer intelligently will entertain me.
I'm in a mood for fun today and, after years of experience, the local sheep are way too nervous of me nowadays for me to have any real fun -- so I'm bumping this thread. Please humor me by asking a more or less serious question about my views of mysticism. I promise that watching your amazingly futile struggle to come up with questions that even I can answer intelligently will entertain me.
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Guitar's Cry
Disciple of Pan
Just why are the local sheep nervous? Have you been walking around in your loincloth again?
What got you interested in mysticism?
What got you interested in mysticism?
I read the earlier posts where you had distinguished between mystical and conscious awareness. Since two years have passed, will you wish to revisit this distinction again? Or will it be OK if I put in my one cent worth on this?
...
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Student of X
Paradigm Shifter
Sunstone, I want to share something that happened to me shortly after the lunar eclipse on the Solstice in December 2010. I am interested in your opinion and the opinions of anyone else who is interested in giving it.
But first, a little bit about me. I am 40, married, no children. I am a Christian gnostic mystic although I have much in common with mystics from all the great traditions. I am on the path of Jungian Individuation, the Bhakti path of devotion to the Great Goddess of Many Names in general and the Goddess of the Bible, Sophia, in particular. I study comparative mysticism, comparative religion, comparative mythology, and parapsychology. I have had a large number of mystical and psychic and paranormal experiences throughout my life, but the one in December takes the cake. OK. Now I'll describe the experience. The day after the lunar eclipse, I was sleeping a dreamless sleep. Something started happening.
I began to gain full conscious awareness within the dreamless sleep without waking up. I woke up without actually waking up, if that makes any sense. I was an aware, disembodied, lucid perspective within the blackness of deep sleep. The fabric of the blackness took on a whole new character. It was deep; infinitely deep and silent. It seemed to crackle with electrical energy around the rough edges of my awareness. It was beautiful and exhilarating. There were two bright glowing pulsating strobing blue round Mandalas, or "UFOs", to use modern mythological terms, that began to materialize in the blackness.
They were comprised of concentric rings of small glowing living blue spheres which flashed or strobed in unison to form different patterns. I was amazed! It was so beautiful and sublime... I think it was the efforts of the living mandalas that brought me to lucidity. I don't know how long I watched them strobe. Eventually, I began to sense that they wanted me to take an action. So I raised my soul-arm, or phantom arm, or dream-arm, or whatever it was to point to where the Mandalas or UFOs or whatever they were would be, in my field of vision, if I had been awake with my eyes open in waking. My arm looked like a thought with little lights sprinkled throughout it like stars or diamonds. It was cool! I pointed to them and sent them the thought, "that point in space is where you two would be hovering, from my perspective, if I was awake and standing up. Right there and right there. See? I'm pointing right at you. I am aware." I sensed that they acknowledged my action and thoughts.
Then they faded away and a third form began to emerge from the center of the blackness. I have a hard time describing it this third form. I can't find the words. It was outlined in a glow and was very hard to make out. I got the impression it was intelligent and powerful and Holy. I think it was God or Goddess or a Jungian archetype or something like that. But I couldn't bring the form into focus well enough to make out definite features. It was like how a shifting cloak of space and light might look in a realm of subspace and darkness. Amorphous might be a good word. Or ineffable. It was aware of me, that much I was sure of.
Time just didn't seem to register. I don't know how much time passed, if indeed the concept of time has any meaning. But I drifted back to a normal dreamless sleep for a while. Then something else happened.
It was as if I was dreaming of my bedroom in real-time. I could look around the bedroom with my dream-eyes instead of my real eyes. It was so cool! I was dreaming of it exactly as it was in the waking world, except there was a shadow form in the room. A presence made out of shadow that played a cat-and-mouse game with my awareness.
There came a point when the shadow entity was right next to my bed, near my head. Right in my face. I thought, "ah-ha! I have you now!" and I playfully shot my arm out to seize the shadow. There was only air...it disappeared. After that, I drifted back to normal dreamless sleep. I don't remember any further dreams that night.
I was altered by the whole experience. I don't know how to describe it, but I am not the same person I was. I feel different, and yet the same. For days I felt like I was getting used to being back in my body. I am feeling like I am a flower that was planted in the Garden of the Divine.
But first, a little bit about me. I am 40, married, no children. I am a Christian gnostic mystic although I have much in common with mystics from all the great traditions. I am on the path of Jungian Individuation, the Bhakti path of devotion to the Great Goddess of Many Names in general and the Goddess of the Bible, Sophia, in particular. I study comparative mysticism, comparative religion, comparative mythology, and parapsychology. I have had a large number of mystical and psychic and paranormal experiences throughout my life, but the one in December takes the cake. OK. Now I'll describe the experience. The day after the lunar eclipse, I was sleeping a dreamless sleep. Something started happening.
I began to gain full conscious awareness within the dreamless sleep without waking up. I woke up without actually waking up, if that makes any sense. I was an aware, disembodied, lucid perspective within the blackness of deep sleep. The fabric of the blackness took on a whole new character. It was deep; infinitely deep and silent. It seemed to crackle with electrical energy around the rough edges of my awareness. It was beautiful and exhilarating. There were two bright glowing pulsating strobing blue round Mandalas, or "UFOs", to use modern mythological terms, that began to materialize in the blackness.
They were comprised of concentric rings of small glowing living blue spheres which flashed or strobed in unison to form different patterns. I was amazed! It was so beautiful and sublime... I think it was the efforts of the living mandalas that brought me to lucidity. I don't know how long I watched them strobe. Eventually, I began to sense that they wanted me to take an action. So I raised my soul-arm, or phantom arm, or dream-arm, or whatever it was to point to where the Mandalas or UFOs or whatever they were would be, in my field of vision, if I had been awake with my eyes open in waking. My arm looked like a thought with little lights sprinkled throughout it like stars or diamonds. It was cool! I pointed to them and sent them the thought, "that point in space is where you two would be hovering, from my perspective, if I was awake and standing up. Right there and right there. See? I'm pointing right at you. I am aware." I sensed that they acknowledged my action and thoughts.
Then they faded away and a third form began to emerge from the center of the blackness. I have a hard time describing it this third form. I can't find the words. It was outlined in a glow and was very hard to make out. I got the impression it was intelligent and powerful and Holy. I think it was God or Goddess or a Jungian archetype or something like that. But I couldn't bring the form into focus well enough to make out definite features. It was like how a shifting cloak of space and light might look in a realm of subspace and darkness. Amorphous might be a good word. Or ineffable. It was aware of me, that much I was sure of.
Time just didn't seem to register. I don't know how much time passed, if indeed the concept of time has any meaning. But I drifted back to a normal dreamless sleep for a while. Then something else happened.
It was as if I was dreaming of my bedroom in real-time. I could look around the bedroom with my dream-eyes instead of my real eyes. It was so cool! I was dreaming of it exactly as it was in the waking world, except there was a shadow form in the room. A presence made out of shadow that played a cat-and-mouse game with my awareness.
There came a point when the shadow entity was right next to my bed, near my head. Right in my face. I thought, "ah-ha! I have you now!" and I playfully shot my arm out to seize the shadow. There was only air...it disappeared. After that, I drifted back to normal dreamless sleep. I don't remember any further dreams that night.
I was altered by the whole experience. I don't know how to describe it, but I am not the same person I was. I feel different, and yet the same. For days I felt like I was getting used to being back in my body. I am feeling like I am a flower that was planted in the Garden of the Divine.
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There were several events that came together when I was in my late teens to create what has turned out to be a life long interest in the subject. Perhaps one of the more important of those events took place when I was 18 or 19.
I took a college course in comparative religion during which I had an opportunity to compare the writings of a Spanish mystic living in the 1200s with the writings of a Chinese mystic living around 500 BC. I was struck with how much they seemed in agreement.
Yet, I was at a loss to explain to my satisfaction how they could be saying nearly the same things. That troublesome problem nagged at me for a long time. And, over the next few years, I ran across one example after another of other mystics saying more or less the same things. Each new example refreshed my interest in figuring out how mystics could be in such great agreement when most of us were not in nearly as much agreement as those bothersome mystics.
There were a few other events of a much sillier, but personal, nature that I will, if you wish, PM you with. For instance: The astonishing revelation I had while bathing my favorite ewe in Woolite prior to... but I can't talk about that on a family forum.
I haven't re-read the thread yet, Atanu, so I might be missing something, but I think I am still in substantial agreement with my earlier, albeit ridiculous notion, that one way -- but perhaps only one way (i.e. there seem to be many ways) -- of distinguishing between mystical awareness and conscious awareness is on the basis of subject / object perception.
Your one cent would substantially raise the value of this thread. Please feel free to have a go at it!
I have an interest in some forms of mysticism, Paul, but I do not consider myself a mystic. Nor, for that matter, am I an expert on mysticism.
I confess you still possess the power to amuse me, Paul: May I ask how you came up with the peculiar notion that mystics come with credentials? When I read that, I could only imagine you have somehow found a copy of the Buddha's diploma. I'm all ears to hear what you think his credentials are? But please PM me. Let's not derail this silly thread with your profoundity.
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Sure, I'll give it a shot.
When I am consciously aware of something, I experience a division between me (the observer) and it (whatever it is that I observe). In other words, when I am consciously aware of something I perceive a division between me (the subject) and it (the object). I take those two sentences to be synonymous.
And here's one way to describe in a simple way that division between me and it, between the observer and the observed, between subject and object: So far as I can see, I am not the notebook on my desk that I am looking at.
Apparently, this division of reality into me and not-me is ultimately caused by as yet largely unknown physiological processes in my brain. Yet, if that's the case, then any such processes can be interrupted. And, indeed, they sometimes are.
For instance, it appears those processes are routinely interrupted after I go to sleep -- or in any other moments when I lose consciousness. But what might happen if those processes were interrupted while I, in some sense of "I", was still awake? Or still aware?
I believe that if and when that happens there is no longer a division in perception or awareness between me and it, between the observer and the thing observed, between subject and object. Put somewhat poetically, "I and the universe become one". And this "One", this "Unity of all things", or more simply this "All", is sometimes called by some mystics, "god"; and by other mystics other words.
I believe Seyorni said it well when he somewhere mentioned that this "Unity" is the sine qua non -- the indispensable condition -- of this particular kind of mystical awareness.
I think it is important, however, to recognize that when mystics use that word "god", they are -- so far as I can see -- not talking about the Gods of non-mystics. At least not in any significant way.
I hope this has been helpful.
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